B.C. mayor wants other cities to consider withholding payments to province over ER closures

The mayor of a B.C. city where the hospital emergency room has been plagued by closures due to staffing shortages says he plans to withhold health-care payments to the province and is encouraging other local leaders to do the same.

The emergency department at Nicola Valley Hospital in Merritt has been closed 16 times in 2023, most recently over the Thanksgiving long weekend.

Mayor Michael Goetz says he has not been reassured that future closures will be prevented and that people in his community will have reliable access to care when they need it most.

"It affects the way you live. On the weekend, I was out with a couple of friends and somebody said, 'Be careful don't get hurt because our hospital's closed down,'" he told CTV News.

During these closures, patients requiring urgent care are told to go to Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops, which requires an hour-long, 85-kilometre drive along one of the province's most treacherous routes. With cooling weather and more precipitation, the possibility that the Coquihalla Highway will be closed or dangerous to drive on looms large.

"When the weather does turn bad for us, it turns bad in a big hurry," Goetz says, adding that one of his major concerns is that people travelling to get care will not make it to Kamloops in time or will be badly injured or killed in a crash on the way to an out-of-town hospital.

"We end up with a lot of black ice and roads that are temporarily closed and temporarily opened and it can be it can be a little scary sometimes," he continued.

Although Goetz says he has the ear of the Health Minister and other provincial officials, he says the province has not provided a plan he is confident will address the issue with the urgency it requires.

"I don't think it's fair to ask people to pay for something that they never got," Goetz said, estimating the number of closures this calendar year will hit at least 20 and the amount of money he plans to hold back will be significant.

"It's going to be a fairly, fairly big amount, I'm sure. And I'm sure I'll be told I can't do it."

At the municipal level, Goetz says someone who buys a monthly pass to a city facility like a pool gets a credit in the event of a closure, and he thinks the province should provide the same kind of response when it fails to deliver a promised service.

Goetz notes that over the long weekend three other Interior Health emergency departments were closed -- in New Denver, Oliver and Keremeos –communities that he says "keep getting nailed" by last-minute closures.

"I'm trying to encourage some of the other mayors to start doing the same thing," he said.

While the province has touted progress on hiring health-care workers, Goetz says the impact of that is not being felt on the frontlines in the Interior.

"The premier did mention that they have 1,000 nurses ready to go, and you know what, I'll take two or three," he said.

"If there's a plan, we'd like to see what the plan is and maybe we can help with that plan, be part of that plan and push that wagon with them to get this problem fixed – because we need to fix this for everybody in B.C., it's not just us."

With files from CTV News Vancouver's Penny Daflos